Plague

It was with great glee that I read Al Martinez's article about Rob Scribner, the fundamentalist pretender to the 27th Congressional District seat. As a former wanderer in the twilight zone of born-again Christian fundamentalism, I have become more than a little fed up as Scribner and his fellow would-be theocrats have descended on the land like a plague of locusts since their conquest of the White House in 1980. I have been trying to ride out this eight-year reenactment of the Dark Ages as best I can, like one would a bad case of pneumonia.

Africa's worst locust plague in 30 years is almost over, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Thursday. An FAO statement said the population of desert locusts that ravaged crops in North and Central Africa last year has been virtually wiped out by pesticide spraying and lack of rain. Millions of locusts also perished in an unprecedented flight over the Atlantic last October. Only Niger and Mali have been infested in the last 10 days and only small numbers of locusts persist in West and North Africa.

Los Angeles County health officials are conducting investigations of sylvatic plague in animals found in four hilly areas. Evidence of exposure was found in a ground squirrel and coyote in Griffith Park, in two stray dogs in Topanga and Santa Clarita and in a domestic cat in Rancho Palos Verdes. The disease, which in humans usually occurs as bubonic plague, can be transmitted by bites from infected fleas.

A rare form of plague has killed at least 61 people at a diamond mine in remote northeastern Congo, and authorities fear that hundreds more who fled into the forest to escape contagion are already infected and dying, the World Health Organization said. The agency's Dr. Eric Bertherat said the outbreak had been building since December around a mine near Zobia, 170 miles north of Kisangani. Nearly all the 7,000 miners have abandoned the affected area.

Plague cases multiplied across India on Wednesday as the scourge spread into the region surrounding Bombay, to the heart of the capital, New Delhi, and across the country to the teeming city of Calcutta. Nearly 1,000 people have been stricken by the disease, which kills if not treated, authorities in New Delhi said.

A man who said he was a white supremacist was arrested for allegedly obtaining bubonic plague bacteria through the mail, and investigators say they are trying to learn what he planned to do with it. Larry W. Harris had "rather radical views" and told colleagues at a food testing lab where he worked that he was a white supremacist and sympathetic to the militia movement, Superior Labs spokesman Brad Starrett said Tuesday.

Four or five days a week throughout the spring, summer and fall, Ted L. Brown laces up his steel-toed Red Wing boots, plants a wide-brimmed canvas hat on his head and hits the road. He roams the rugged mountains and mesas of rural northern New Mexico, interviewing residents and looking for fleas. It's hot, dirty and potentially dangerous, but he loves his job. In late 20th-Century America, Brown tracks plague for a living.

Plague has been found in the squirrel population at a popular camping site on Palomar Mountain in northern San Diego County, health officials said Wednesday. Though plague is not uncommon among the squirrels there, this year's discovery is earlier than most years. Vector control officials take yearly blood samples from squirrels at the Doane Valley Campground and other spots on the mountain. Plague is a bacterial disease in wild rodents that can be transmitted to humans through the bite of infected fleas.

The World Health Organization sought to assure a worried world Thursday that the plague in India is not likely to spread abroad and said the outbreak is expected to be over within three weeks. About 1,500 suspected victims were in quarantine wards as India's death toll from pneumonic plague reached 48. All except one of the fatalities occurred near the epicenter of the outbreak in the western state of Gujarat since the first death was reported Sept. 20.

Medieval farming techniques stripped the soil of nutrients, probably generating widespread malnutrition and weakening resistance to the Black Death plague in England, researchers at the University of Bristol reported in New Scientist. Historians have long puzzled over why the population of England leveled off at about 5 million just before the plague struck in the 14th century.